Robert Maynard Hutchins

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Reform-minded educator Robert Maynard Hutchins (1899-1977) aroused controversy over his views on liberal education in America. Critical of overspecialization, he fought for a balance between college curriculum and Western intellectual tradition at the University of Chicago in the 1930s and 1940s. Until his retirement in 1974, three years before his death in 1977, Hutchins was chairman of the Board of Editors of "Encyclopaedia Britannica".

Robert M. Hutchins was born in Brooklyn, New York, Jan. 17, 1899, but grew up in Oberlin, Ohio, where his father was professor of theology at Oberlin College. Hutchins himself entered Oberlin at the age of 16, only to have his academic career interrupted by World War I. He enlisted in the army and served as an ambulance driver in Italy, earning the Italian medal, Croce di Guerra, in 1918. Home once more, he completed his education at Yale University, where he graduated with honors in 1921.

Hutchins was on a fast career track for the next seven years. He taught at Lake Placid School in New York from 1921 to 1923, while attending Yale Law School, where he graduated with honors in 1925. He was secretary of Yale from 1923 to 1927, named a full professor of the law school in 1927 and dean the following year.

The University of Chicago Years

Hutchins was just 29 years old when he took over Yale Law School, but he was already making his views known concerning American education. His plan to raise entrance requirements and set higher scholastic standards was regarded as "refreshing" in one so young. However, when he became president of the University of Chicago in 1929, at the age of 30, he began to be regarded as controversial.

In Chicago, Hutchins became the era's most exciting and discussed figure in education. He asserted that universities should be centers of independent thought and criticism, operating to change things from the way they are to the way they ought to be. "We have confused science with information, ideas with facts, and knowledge with miscellaneous data," he said. He decried the tendency toward specialization and vocationalism.

In the late 1930s, Hutchins introduced his Chicago Plan for liberal education, based on his belief that the last two years of high school in America duplicated the first two years of college. Its main element was a drastic reorganization that began collegiate education in the third year of high school and ended after the second year of college. The curriculum consisted of 14 year-long comprehensive courses, each integrating a basic field - the physical, biological, and social sciences and the humanities. Students demonstrated mastery of a subject by passing a comprehensive examination that could be administered at any time, whether they attended classes or not. Instruction was primarily by discussion. Hutchins believed that "dialogue" rather than lecturing was the best means of learning.

The controversial Hutchins also introduced a Great Books course at the university to encourage a wider breath of knowledge. Also, his belief that colleges placed undue emphasis on extracurricular activities brought an end to intercollegiate football at Chicago in 1939.

By 1942, the University of Chicago was awarding the bachelor's degree for those who completed the new program. Students were admitted to the college on the basis of placement tests rather than high school records.

Continuing Controversy

Most educators reacted to the Chicago Plan with outrage. Many universities refused to recognize the "two-year degree." Nevertheless, Hutchins had stirred up a hornet's nest in liberal education. Even those who opposed his ideas introduced some of his general courses into their own institutions.

In 1935, the state legislature investigated the University of Chicago on charges of "communistic influences" in the school. Hutchins eloquently defended the freedom to teach, which set the tone in the wave of similar investigations that swept educational institutions during this era.

Hutchins was against U.S. participation in World War II for which he said the country was "morally unprepared." Ironically, his university had a large part in the development of the atomic bomb. A government grant of $2 billion led to the first "controlled" chain reaction experiment just five days before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, on December 7, 1941, and brought the United States into the war.

The Later Years

Leaving the university in 1951, after serving the last six years as chancellor, Hutchins became the associate director of the Ford Foundation, whose purpose is to further the cause of peace. In 1954, he was named president of the Fund for the Republic, which advocated no restrictions on freedom of thought and expression in the United States. In 1959, he founded the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, which approached his ideal of a community of scholars, in Santa Barbara, CA. Besides his own published works on education, Hutchins was chairman of the Board of Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica from 1943 until his retirement in 1974.

Hutchins's first marriage, to sculptress Maude Phelps McVeigh in 1921, ended in divorce in 1948. The couple had three daughters, Mary Frances, Joanna, and Clarissa. In 1949, he married Vesta Sutton Orlick. The controversial educator died in Santa Barbara, CA, on May 17, 1977.

Further Reading

Hutchins wrote of his Chicago experience in The Higher Learning in America (1936), No Friendly Voice (1937), and The Great Conversation: The Substance of a Liberal Education (1952). There is no full-scale biography; Thomas C. Reeves, Freedom and the Foundation: The Fund for the Republic in the Era of McCarthyism (1969), is the fullest interpretation. Good secondary accounts of the Hutchins years at Chicago are Chauncey S. Boucher, The Chicago College Plan (1935), and Reuben Frodin and others, The Idea and Practice of General Education: An Account of the College of the University of Chicago by Present and Former Members of the Faculty (1950). Arthur A. Cohen, ed., Humanistic Education and Western Civilization: Essays for Robert M. Hutchins (1964), has a chapter on Hutchins.

(1899-1977), educator and author. Hutchins, born to a line of college-trained clergymen, excelled in his studies at Oberlin College and Yale. Tall, handsome, witty, and self-assured, he did not wait long for opportunity and recognition. After graduating from Yale with honors in 1921, he was named secretary of the Yale Corporation, found time amid his duties to complete a law degree in 1925, and two years later was named dean of the Yale Law School--at age twenty-eight.

Here began his career as an educational reformer. Associating himself with the younger "legal realist" school of jurisprudence and bringing in new faculty such as William O. Douglas, Hutchins in two years changed the course of the law school's development. In 1929, taking a "gamble on youth and brilliancy," the trustees of the University of Chicago appointed Hutchins president.

The gamble brought Chicago a twenty-year season of educational ferment that kept the university at the forefront of American education and established Hutchins as the nation's most audacious, innovative, and controversial university executive. He held strong views on the importance of a core undergraduate curriculum built around the "great books" of the Western tradition and was an outspoken critic of vocational emphases and narrow specialization. He engaged in public debate with educational philosopher John Dewey and published (during his lifetime) over three hundred essays on education, including most notably The Higher Learning in America (1936). He abolished football at Chicago, though most of his proposed curricular reforms were modified or blocked. Nevertheless, Chicago was in Hutchins's day a place of remarkable intellectual ferment.

Outspoken on many public issues and liberal in his politics, Hutchins was rumored to be in line for several New Deal posts in the late 1930s. He yearned only for a seat on the Supreme Court where his independence would be assured and his analytical powers given full scope, but this prospect faded when he opposed President Franklin D. Roosevelt's rearmament policies in 1940-1941.

Hutchins left Chicago in 1951 and with Ford Foundation support established the Fund for the Republic in 1954 and, as its operating arm, the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Montecito, California, in 1959. Here he would establish his "great academy," a place where intellect could accomplish what modern universities could not--address the fundamentals of democratic institutions, serve as an "early warning system" for problems just over the societal horizon, and join social theory with social action. The center adopted no official stands, but its meetings and publications scrutinized the nuclear arms race, the errors of American foreign policy, and the failings of the press, and asserted the nation's vital stake in freedom of inquiry. The center's impact has not yet received adequate assessment; it closed in 1979, two years after Hutchins's death.

Bibliography:

Harry S. Ashmore, Unseasonable Truths: The Life of Robert Maynard Hutchins (1989).

Author:

Otis L. Graham, Jr.

See also Education.

A major voice for general education in American higher education, Robert Maynard Hutchins wrote, spoke about, and influenced public policy during his almost fifty years as teacher, educator, and administrator. Known in the educational world for his enthusiasm and dedication to liberal education with an emphasis on the Great Books and great ideas, he was also, during various times in his career, an ardent defender of academic freedom in the university and of democratic freedoms and principles in American society. He was known, too, for his style, wit, and sense of humor as he argued for what were often both iconoclastic and unpopular points of view.

Hutchins, born in Brooklyn, New York, moved at age eight to Oberlin, Ohio, where his father, a minister, taught at Oberlin College, an institution Hutchins attended from 1915 to 1917. He served in the ambulance service during World War I prior to attending and graduating from Yale University (1921) and the Yale Law School (1925). He was named dean of the Yale Law School in 1927 where he presided until 1930, when he became the youngest president ever of a major university, the University of Chicago. Upon leaving the University of Chicago in 1951, he spent four years with the Ford Foundation (1951 - 1954) and then the remainder of his career with the Ford Foundation-sponsored Fund for the Republic (1954 - 1977) and the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions (1959 - 1973, 1975 - 1977).

While president of the University of Chicago (1930 - 1951), Hutchins was an eloquent spokesperson for a particular view of higher education. A liberal education was a moral endeavor to discover what was good and how to act on it. He believed that the university should nurture the life of the mind and be a community of scholars rather than an organization without a core, with specialization in the disciplines, and with increased vocationalism framing the curriculum. An expression of his approach was the Hutchins College of the University of Chicago, where young students who had not yet finished high school were admitted to study and acquired a liberal education and where, for example, successful completion of a degree was based on passing comprehensive examinations rather than accumulating course credits. The pedagogical model of choice was small discussion classes and the Socratic method, and the content for discussions included interacting with the Great Books.

Hutchins was a controversial administrator and no area of the university escaped his scrutiny. He continually engaged members of the University of Chicago faculty in attempts to make the university, from his point of view, more just and equitable. In the extracurricular arena, despite the fact that the University of Chicago dominated football in the Western Conference (later to become the Big Ten) and one of its players was the first Heisman trophy winner, Hutchins in 1939 convinced the university that it should drop intercollegiate football. He purportedly claimed, as the reason for dropping it, that it was possible to win 12 letters before learning to write one.

During his presidency at Chicago, Hutchins defended the university and its faculty in academic freedom issues. A staunch defender of free speech in both the academy and in a democratic society, his principled defenses prevailed. When the case of one faculty member accused of teaching communism was to be discussed by the board of trustees, a faculty colleague confronted Hutchins and said: "If the trustees fire [the faculty member], you will receive the resignations of 20 full professors tomorrow morning. Hutchins replied, "Oh, no, I won't. My successor will" (Mayer, p. xii).

During his tenure at the university Hutchins was involved in the publication of the Great Books of the Western World and the Encyclopaedia Britannica. These two enterprises both enhanced Chicago's reputation and brought additional monetary resources for use in the university. Despite his opposition to the pragmatists in the philosophy department, Hutchins was a consummately successful fundraiser who had no difficulty spending money (he always exceeded the yearly university budget).

During World War II Hutchins committed the university to complete support of the war effort. The university was the site, or more precisely and perhaps ironically, a squash court under the football stands in Stagg Field was the site, of the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction. This theoretical advance, a part of the Manhattan project, led, of course, to the first atomic bomb and the beginning of the nuclear age. After the war Hutchins tried but failed to get nuclear physicists to not disseminate their knowledge and techniques and to discontinue such work.

Hutchins' strong beliefs in democratic values and his defense of fundamental freedoms continued during his tenure with Fund for the Republic, a Ford Foundation-sponsored organization. He led a number of projects that directly opposed the political machinations of the now infamous Joseph McCarthy, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and other groups that perceived communist threats to the United States. Among the most devastating projects of the Fund for the Republic was one that produced a two-volume report of blacklisting in industry with an emphasis on television and the movies. Hutchins, however, did not emerge unscathed from this work and was attacked by the press and popular media for his views.

During its first few years the Fund for the Republic concentrated on projects that produced information and knowledge that could be widely disseminated. The major activity of the fund from the late 1950s until the mid-1970s, however, was support for the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions. His last attempt to create a community of scholars, the Center in Santa Barbara, California, was a place for resident scholars and invited guests to discuss serious issues. Under Hutchins the Center hosted and supported numerous international conferences and a publishing enterprise that created an international presence for its deliberations.

Bibliography

Ashmore, Harry S. 1989. Unseasonable Truths: The Life of Robert Maynard Hutchins. Boston: Little, Brown.

Hutchins, Robert Maynard. 1936. The Higher Learning in America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Hutchins, Robert Maynard. 1943. Education for Freedom. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University.

Hutchins, Robert Maynard. 1968. The Learning Society. New York: Praeger.

Mayer, Milton. 1993. Robert Maynard Hutchins: A Memoir. Berkeley: University of California Press.

— EDWARD KIFER

Quotes:

"The three major administrative problems on a campus are sex for the students, athletics for the alumni, and parking for the faculty."

"The college graduate is presented with a sheepskin to cover his intellectual nakedness."

"Education is not to reform students or amuse them or to make them expert technicians. It is to unsettle their minds, widen their horizons, inflame their intellects, teach them to think straight, if possible."

"Whenever I feel like exercise I lie down until the feeling passes."

"We can put television in its proper light by supposing that Gutenberg's great invention had been directed at printing only comic books."

"A world community can exist only with world communication, which means something more than extensive short-wave facilities scattered ;about the globe. It means common understanding, a common tradition, common ideas, and common ideals."

See more famous quotes by Robert M. Hutchins

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